Designing Bots

Chapter 17. Designing and Testing

I love taking an idea to a prototype, and then to a product that millions of people use.

—SUSAN WOJCICKI

THERE ARE A LOT of ways to design a conversation. One option is to just expand on the Wizard of Oz technique demonstrated in Chapter 15, and mimic the scripts by impersonating the bot. While this is a very easy and quick method to get your product in front of your users and other stakeholders, it provides low fidelity when it comes to rendering rich interactions. This is because the chat platforms limit the types of rich controls available to humans. Users can post simple images, GIFs, and even videos, but they cannot display buttons, for example.

When it comes to software solutions, there are also a lot of design tools that provide you with different levels of fidelity and ease of use. There are many good options, and you should pick the ones that suit you. I have chosen two tools as examples, one for designing bots for Facebook Messenger and the other for Slack.

In the next few sections, we will go over the scripts we created in the previous chapter and use these design tools to visualize these scripts. For each script, we will try to fine-tune the wording, formatting, and other aspects of the conversation. This is an iterative process that will demonstrate design in real life.

Designing VacationBot for Facebook Messenger with Botsociety

Let’s start with a tool called Botsociety (https://botsociety.io). Botsociety is a super-easy and quite ...